A special court in Bareilly on Monday awarded death sentence to a man, holding him guilty of killing a 10-year-old Dalit girl —after raping her — in Siklighar Gotia village in 2009.

The accused had also tried to hide the victim's body in a haystack.

Special Judge Umesh Chandra Pandey, who delivered the judgment, held that it was a rarest of rare crime, according to Senior Prosecuting Officer Sudhir Kumar Tyagi.

The court convicted 32-year-old Ashok on four different charges. Among the witnesses was the girl's seven-year-old brother.

Tyagi said the court awarded death penalty to Ashok on the charge of murder, while he was sentenced to life imprisonment and a fine of Rs 50,000 was imposed on him for rape. For causing disappearance of evidence, the court sentenced Ashok to seven years jail and a fine of Rs 25,000. He was given life imprisonment and fined Rs 25,000 for violation of the SC/ST Atrocities Act.

According to the prosecution, on May 27, 2009 morning, the girl, along with her younger brother Vivesh, went to the fields for grazing goats. At 10.30 am, both went to a tubewell — where Ashok was working — for drinking water.

There, Ashok caught the girl. A scared Vivesh ran to his house and informed his father Heera Lal, who is a labourer. When Heera Lal went to the tubewell, Ashok told him that his daughter had left after drinking water. However, Heera Lal found the body of his daughter in the haystack in a room near the tubewell.

The postmortem established that the girl had been raped and later strangulated. The police arrested Ashok and sent him to jail.

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